Cate smiled at me for a minute, and I thought she was going to say something else, and my pulse beat flutter-hard at my temples and deep in my stomach. Then she swiveled back toward the mirror and began brushing her teeth, and I quietly left the room, turning everything over in my head.
* * *
Tom had bought food, greasy chips, sugary cereal, and we ate with our hands straight from the packages, crowded in front of the TV. Isabelle still had the book from Delilah Stroud’s bedroom. Every time I saw her reading it, it broke my heart—the pages covered in a looping, bubbly cursive, all innocence and playfulness, different colors of ink. It also gave me a sense of grim satisfaction over what we’d done in Kithira. We’d avenged Delilah, at least.
“How did you do it?” I asked Isabelle one evening, my curiosity getting the better of me. “Kill that man.”
Isabelle looked at me as if she didn’t know what I was talking about.
“You can tell me.” I thought of Patricia’s hunger to uncover anything remarkable in her daughter’s body. Now here it was, manifesting miles and miles outside of Patricia’s reach.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Isabelle said, and I was about to push her until I remembered how long it’d taken me to admit what had happened at the motel, even to myself.
The days dragged by, surreal, each one a day that I technically shouldn’t have even experienced. Commercials blared and jangled from the TV set. With the blinds drawn, it was hard to tell the time of day. I kept remembering the period after Bonnie’s attack, hiding out with my mother in a motel on the edge of town, fearful of copycat attacks.
Bonnie. Every time I thought about her, there was a scratch at the back of my head. I remembered that scar running across her face.
We were in a small town in Pennsylvania. When I ventured outside, I understood why the others had chosen this motel. It was isolated, forests huddled in close. Something about the dreary midday light reminded me of wintertime. Only one other car besides Tom’s Volvo sat in the lot. This was a place where people came to be alone. Nobody would bother us here.
I hesitated, then went over to the graffiti-scrawled pay phone, fishing in my pocket for a quarter. I punched the zero button. When the operator answered, I asked to be connected with Bonnie Clarkson in Minnesota. I didn’t even think she’d answer, but then suddenly her voice arrived in my ear, bored and casual: “Yeah? Who’s this?”
“It’s Josephine,” I said, picturing her in her vast, marble-cool house. “Morrow.”
“Girl One,” Bonnie repeated, some of the boredom falling away. “I didn’t expect to hear from you again.”
“Remember when you asked me if I’d ever acted strange? My answer has changed.” Bonnie didn’t speak, but I could hear her breathing shift, the catch of interest. I told her about the man at the motel in Iowa or Missouri or wherever we’d been after we left the Clarksons, what felt like decades ago. The way he’d cornered me. Grabbed me. “I hurt him. I told him to pick up a piece of broken glass and hold it against his throat. I just wanted him to feel what it was to be helpless, the way he’d made me helpless. And I enjoyed it.”
She was silent on the other end for a moment. “You made him do it? How?”
“He did anything I said.”
“Wow,” Bonnie said. Her lack of surprise was exactly what I’d expected. “Crazy.”
“Listen,” I said, “I need to know what happened to your attacker, because I need to know who’s following us. If you know something that you didn’t share with me, then—”
“That’s why I tried to tell you it would be a waste of time, Josie,” Bonnie interrupted, frustrated now. “My attacker wasn’t the one who burned your mother’s house down. He’s already dead. I took care of it a long time ago. I would’ve told you that night, but my mother never wants me talking about it. It’s the one promise I try to keep.”
I inhaled. Of course. “What did you do?”
“How much detail do you want? For years, I obsessed over him. I pretended to my mother I was okay. I pretended that all the therapy worked. But every night I just lay there remembering the attack, so he would be fresh in my mind when he came back. Because I knew he would, and he did. I was thirteen and I’d just been in some god-awful Christmas special.” I remembered watching this special on TV while my mom was in the other room, volume muted so she wouldn’t catch me in the act, enraptured by Bonnie wearing a Santa-red, fur-trimmed minidress and singing along with a host of C-listers. “I guess the guy had a thing for carols because he got in touch. I wrote him back and he finally included a picture. There he was. That same crooked grin. I told him to come to my house on a night when I knew my mother would be out late. When he got there, I was waiting in a little slinky dress and Cherries in the Snow lipstick.